the relevance of duesenberry consumption theory:

an applied case to latin america*

Jairo Parada Corrales**, William Bacca Mejía***

* This a modified version of a paper presented at the 2008 Post Keynesian

Conference. Kansas City, MO (USA), June 28th-July 1st, 2008.
** PhD. Professor Department of Economics, IEEC, Universidad del Norte
(Colombia). jparadac@uninorte.edu.co
***  Instructor, Department of Economics, IEEC, Universidad del Norte
(Colombsia). PhD Student-Department of Economics-University of
Missouri-Kansas City. wbacamejia@gmail.com

revista de economía del caribe n° 4 Fecha de recepción: julio de 2009

Fecha de aceptación: septiembre de 2009
issn: 2011-2106 [19]
 the relevance of duesenberry consumption theory:
an applied case to latin america

abstract
In this paper we examine the to-date relevance of Duesenberry´s
Consumption Theory through an applied case to four economies
in Latin America: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. Using
annual time series of these countries we show that some empirical
evidence of Duesenberry´s theory still holds and should not be
discarded in modern macroeconomics as it has happened in regular
macro text books in mainstream economics. Duesenberry´s theory
includes important institutional factors that cannot be replaced by
the permanent income hypothesis or the life cycle hypotheses. In the
paper we explore different specifications of the consumption functions
based on the relevant literature. Final conclusions are presented.
k e y wo r d s : Consumption Theory, Duesenberry, Latin America.
j e l c o d e s : E12, E21, 054.

resumen
En este trabajo se examina la relevancia de la teoría del consumo de
Duesenberry a través de un estudio de caso aplicado a cuatro eco-
nomías de América Latina: México, Brasil, Argentina y Colombia. A
través de series de tiempo y de algunas pruebas empíricas demos-
tramos que la teoría de Duesenberry todavía tiene validez y no debe
ser descartada de la macroeconomía moderna. Dicha teoría incluye
importantes factores institucionales que no puede ser sustituida por
la hipótesis del ingreso permanente o de la hipótesis del ciclo de vida.
En este artículo se explora diferentes especificaciones de las funciones
de consumo basadas en la literatura relevante.
p a l ab r a s c l ave : Teoría del Consumo, Duesenberry, Lati-
noamérica.
c l a s i f i c a c i ó n j e l : E12, E21, 054.

[20] revista de economía del caribe n º 4 (2009) págs. 19-36

 Jairo J. Parada, William Bacca

Introduction

Consumption maintains today a very important share of the

GDP of any country of the world. The performance of this
macro variable is related with savings, investment, produc-
tion and employment. When things go wrong with any of the
main components of aggregate consumption the economy
begins to stall. In this paper we explore the relevance of James
Duesenberry´s Consumption theory which appears to be for-
gotten in most of mainstream macro textbooks and not very
much mentioned in heterodox economic books.
At the beginning of this paper we review the main contribu-
tions of this theory, its initial success and sudden disappearance
facing other approaches such as the life cycle hypothesis (LCH)
and the permanent income hypothesis (PIH).Then we summa-
rize different explanations given for that phenomenon followed
by an estimation of a model inspired the relative income theory
of consumption (RIT) inspired in Duesenberry´s approach in
a group of the main Latin American economies during the last
two decades.We claim that the theory still holds despite all the
new events that have occurred in the world economy and in
the area, such as the globalization process and the implemen-
tation of orthodox macro policies inspired in the Washington
Consensus that began to whither away in our continent.

The role of Aggregate Consumption

Modern mainstream macro theory today examines aggregate

consumption as a clear inter temporal choice between pres-
ent and future consumption regarding present and future in-
come, depending on the real interest rate. Individual isolated

revista de economía del caribe nº4 (2009) págs. 19-36 [21]

 the relevance of duesenberry consumption theory:
an applied case to latin america

consumers make this decision that generates outcomes in the

aggregated economy. Any interdependence of preferences
among consumers is ruled out as it would hinder the general
equilibrium solution of consumers in the aggregate economy.
But the truth of the matter is that consumption is the most
important macro variable in any economy today. In a modern
monetary economy with wage labor, consumption becomes
a decisive variable in defining output levels and employment
accounting for 75% to 86% of disposable income of main
developed economies (see figure1). Macro policies regarding
income tax and the nature of government spending are crucial
as they affect low income or higher income households with
different impacts on employment.

86,6

86,4

86,2

86,0

85,8

85,6

85,4

85,2
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Figure 1. United States:

Household Consumption/ Disposable Income (%)

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 Jairo J. Parada, William Bacca

Canada (C/Yd)

77,8
77,6
77,4
77,2

77,0
76,8
76,6
76,4
76,2
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

United Kingdom (C/Yd)

80,0
79,0
78,0
77,0
76,0
75,0
74,0
73,0
72,0
71,0
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

revista de economía del caribe nº4 (2009) págs. 19-36 [23]

 the relevance of duesenberry consumption theory:
an applied case to latin america

Germany

77,8
77,6
77,4
77,2

77,0
76,8
76,6
76,4
76,2
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

France

77,8
77,6
77,4
77,2

77,0
76,8
76,6
76,4
76,2
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

[24] revista de economía del caribe n º 4 (2009) págs. 19-36

 Jairo J. Parada, William Bacca

Japan

74,5
74,0
73,5
73,0
72,5
72,0
71,5
71,0
70,5
70,0
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Source: Elaborated by the authors based on www.oecd.org

In his General Theory Keynes (1936) defined clearly the

relationship between Consumption and disposable income
through the psychological fundamental law of the propensity
to consume where aggregate consumption was a positive di-
minishing function of income.The importance of the aggregate
consumption was clearly stated by Keynes (1936, 27) when
he asserted that,

The outline of our theory can be expressed as follows.When employ-

ment increases, aggregate real income is increased.The psychology of
the community is such that when aggregate real income is increased
aggregate consumption is increased, but not by so much as income.
Hence employers would make a loss if the whole of the increased
employment were to be devoted to satisfying the increased demand
for immediate consumption. Thus, to justify any given amount of
employment there must be an amount of current investment sufficient
to absorb the excess of total output over what the community chooses
to consume when employment is at the given level.

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 the relevance of duesenberry consumption theory:
an applied case to latin america

Later during the 40s and 50s new empirical evidence found
that the average propensity to consume was not a declining
function but a constant in the long run. The debate generated
different attempts to solve this puzzle as the stylized facts in
short run cross sectional studies of household income showed
the opposite: the average propensity to consume fell as income
rises.There was therefore a clear contradiction between the short
run cross sectional consumption functions and the long run one.

J.S. Duesenberry´s Relative Income

Theory of Consumption (RIT)

By the end of the 40’s, J.S. Duesenberry (1949) published his

Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior where he tried
to reformulate Keynes´ theory of consumption. Duesenberry
correctly viewed consumption as a social process, not an indi-
vidual one, and questioned that it was based only on a rational
forward looking calculation. His equation was somewhat dif-
ferent to the Keynesian traditional one:
Ct Y
= a - b. t (1)
Yt Y0
Where Ct = Real per capita consumption of year t
Yt = Real per capita disposable income of year t
Yo = Previous peak of real per capita disposable income
a, b > 0

In (1) we can observe that the second term of the right

hand side of the equation introduces a ratchet effect on con-
sumption depending on the variations of current income with
respect to the previous peak. As Everett Hagen posited “a family

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 Jairo J. Parada, William Bacca

whose income is reduced resists giving up its previous level of

consumption, and its ration of consumption to income rises”
(Hagen, 1955, 51).
Hagen also pointed out that Duesenberry´s solution was
similar to that presented by Modigliani, but he emphasized that
“Duesenberry´s explanation is more elegant. He claimed that
“With superb economy of theory, he makes the same principle
explain both the cyclical and the secular phenomena” (Hagen,
1955, 51).
Similarly, the well known macroeconomist Gardner Ackley
(1951) underlined Duesenberry´s view regarding consump-
tion stating that “Consumption standards are largely socially
determined, but the society which determines them under-
goes profound changes”, showing clearly a feedback process
between consumers and society with its evolving pattern of ur-
banization, migration and deep changes in income distribution.
During the 1950s, Duesenberry´s theory was displaced by
Modigliani and Brumbergh´s life cycle theory of consump-
tion, followed by Friedman´s permanent income hypothesis.
Slowly, these new theories of consumption replaced the RIT
of consumption, imposing the notion of an atomistic approach
of consumers based on utility maximization and probabilistic
calculations of current and future incomes. The idea of social
interdependence of consumers was suppressed (Palley, 200).
On the Post Keynesian side, Bunting (1989) tried to ‘solve’
the consumption paradox tackled by Duesenberry, Modigli-
ani and Friedman claiming that the problem arose from the
confusion originated in comparing aggregated time series data
with cross sectional household spending data. According to
Bunting, “comparison should be on the basis of household or

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 the relevance of duesenberry consumption theory:
an applied case to latin america

aggregate spending, not household with aggregate spending”

(Bunting, 1989, 349).
Bunting claims that as cross-sectional functions are non-
linear transformations of national data, it is not a surprise that
the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is lower for the
short run than for the long run.
Bunting also rightly warns us of the dangers of accepting
Friedman’s Consumption Theory based on the permanent
income hypothesis. In fact, if a larger portion of consumption
is autonomous based on the permanent income variable, the
result is a smaller investment multiplier, and therefore fiscal
policy is ineffective (Bunting, 1989, 357).
More recently, Roger Mason (2000) from an institu-
tional perspective addressed the seminal importance of
Duesenberry´s theory of Consumption, linking his approach
with Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of Leisure Class. Mason argued
that, Duesenberry with his work secured “proper recognition
for the social significance of consumption within economics”
(Mason, 2000, 554). In fact, according to Mason, Duesenberry
underlined the role of the “demonstration effect” in consump-
tion, reinforcing the idea of interdependence of preference
systems. Hence, aggregate demand theory cannot be built on
the basis of individual consumer’s behavior without recogniz-
ing the influence of the consumption choices of others. Hence,
the nature and direction of much individual consumption and
saving was determined by relative and not absolute income.
Mason argued that the main reason why Duesenberry´s
theory was abandoned by mainstream economics was not be-
cause his theory failed in the empirical evidence but “because
an alternative hypothesis was now available that in essence,
recognized no sociology of consumption” (Mason, 2000, 569)

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 Jairo J. Parada, William Bacca

and therefore would pose no threat to conventional mainstream

economic analysis.
David Hamilton (2001) explored ahead the rationale of
Duesenberry´s analysis claiming that Veblen´s institutions/
technology dichotomy would have enriched the analysis in the
sense of the role of technology in consumption. As invention is
the mother of necessity according to the Veblenian perspective,
“Consumers are not reluctant to drop that new technology
when income falls only for reasons of status. For good solid
technological reasons they cannot do so” (Hamilton, 2001,
746). No one would throw away his/her cell phones because
income falls. The upward drift of consumption would be also
explained under this perspective.
Later, a conventional economist such as Robert H. Frank,
following his previous works during the 80s, commented on
the reasons why Duesenberry´s theory disappeared from text
books in economics teaching (Frank, 2005). Indeed, we did
ourselves our own inquiry and found that after an exhaustive
bibliographical revision about the most used basic text books
of Macroeconomics and Principles of Economics, the subject
matter was the exposition of the Modigliani’s Life Cycle
Hypothesis about consumption and Friedman’s Permanent
Income theory.
For example, universities in Latin America offer courses
of Introduction in Economics using as a basic textbook
Mankiw´s and/or Bernanke’s ones, and for the case of the
macroeconomics courses the basic text books are Mankiw,
Dornsbush, Blanchard, Sachs and Bernanke. All of them just
ignored Duesenberry´s theory as it never existed. It is not even
a footnote in mainstream Economics text books.

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 the relevance of duesenberry consumption theory:
an applied case to latin america

Against conventional wisdom, Frank argues that

Duesenberry´s theory behaves better that Friedman’s perma-
nent income theory. Frank claims that all the empirical work
done by careful studies show that savings rates rise sharply
with permanent income. Moreover, people seem to consume
permanent income at the same rate that transitory income.To
Frank, economists do not want to recognize the possibility of
wasteful spending races. That would not be rational. But in
our opinion, from a Veblenian perspective it can be clearly
explained.
The relevance of Duesenberry´s theory is straightforward:
if the ratchet effect plays an important role in consumption,
those policies that emphasize income redistribution in favor
of low and middle income families with higher propensity to
consume would guarantee a more solid floor to the aggregate
demand when facing business cycles. Also, as Palley puts it,
“tax cuts aimed at the bottom of the income distribution are
likely to be more expansionary than tax cuts aimed at the top”
(Palley, 2008, 16).

Consumption in Latin America

Since the 1980’s Latin America experienced economic reforms

inspired in mainstream economic policies determined by the
Washington Consensus. Inflation targeting and equilibrium
budget policies have been the main recipes. Consumption has
been punished through tax reforms that have increased indirect
taxation in a regressive way. Tax exemptions and deductions
have been granted to capital investments in physical capital of
corporations and firms showing a bias against labor.

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 Jairo J. Parada, William Bacca

These policies contributed to the recession at the end of the

90s and generated a huge political turmoil that has generated
important shifts in the political orientation of the main Latin
American countries, due to the negative effects caused in terms
of income distribution and unemployment. Price stability was
achieved at a deep social cost.
We selected a group of the main Latin American economies
in order to explore the validity of Duesenberry´s theory in the
region. Data was obtained from the Economic Commission
of Latin America (ECLA) of United Nations. The information
about disposable income was estimated by us for the period
1980-89 as we could not find this information directly, us-
ing the estimates by ECLA of the participation of taxes over
national income.
In figure 2 we can observe the tremendous participation of
aggregate consumption on disposable income and the stability
of the long run average propensity to consume, as the long run
trend of the APC is very much higher than those countries of
figure 1, ranking from 80% to 90%. In developing nations
with higher Gini coefficients it is well known that patterns of
income distribution are generally worse than many developed
countries. For that reason low and middle income household
have a higher weight in the aggregate propensity to consume.
Hence, it is no surprise than the APC of most households in de-
veloping nations with less capacity to save, is higher compared
with the developed countries as data from figure 2 reveals.
In order to estimate the Duesenberry consumption func-
tions we used a modified version of (1), based on the fact that
Ct is affected by previous Yo transforming this model in an
implicit way in an autoregressive model. For that reason we

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 the relevance of duesenberry consumption theory:
an applied case to latin america

100,0

90,0

80,0

70,0

60,0

50,0

40,0

30,0

20,0

10,0

0,0
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
A rgentina B ras il C olombia Mex ic o

Source: Elaborated by the authors based on www.ecla.org

Figure 2. Main countries of Latin America:
Average propensity to consume of Brazil, Argentina,
Mexico and Colombia, 1980-2005

used the transformation suggested by Singh et al (1976)1, based

on Davis (1952) as followed:

(C/Y)*t = α + β (Y /Yo) (2)

Where (C/Y)* is determined by the Nerlovian “partial

adjustment” model as

[ (C/Y)t - (C/Y)t-1 ] = γ [(C/Y)t* - (C/Y)t-1]

  Singh et al. (1976) proposed to use the previous peak Co as a proxy

1

for Yo but in our case with not very good data bases (annual data instead of
quarterly data) we preferred to use the original Duesenberry´s formula.

[32] revista de economía del caribe n º 4 (2009) págs. 19-36

 Jairo J. Parada, William Bacca

Where γ is the adjustment coefficient.Therefore, the new

equation to estimate would be:

(C/Y)t = α ' + β ' (Y/Yo)t + γ ' (C/Y)t-1 (3)

And obviously,

Using (3) we run an OLS regression for four countries such

as Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, using time series
as explained above. The model was run individually for each
country and generally for a time series-cross sectional regres-
sion for all countries as the business cycle was very similar to
all during the period 1980-2005.

Tabla 1
Duesenberry´s Consumption Functions for
four countries in Latina America:
Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia (1980-2005)
Model: (C/Y)t = α ' + β ' (Y/Yo)t + γ ' (C/Y)t-1

h-Durbin
Countries α' β' γ' R2 (5%)
Brazil 0.42844* -0.05403 0.5969* 0.3970 -0.55
Mexico 0.17664 0.03920 0.751087* 0.5362 2.34
Argentina 0.30399* -0.01273 0.6769* 0.7783 1.42
Colombia 0.20350* -0.07050* -0.8737* 0.9239 0.33
All countries 0.184447* -0.018231 0.799364* 0.7999 0.81
* Significant at a 5% level.

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 the relevance of duesenberry consumption theory:
an applied case to latin america

In table 1 we can observe the results for our model defined

in (3) where we got the best performance of the model for the
case of Colombia where the Duesenberry effect is clear ( β ' )
with all the coefficients with the right signs and significant.The
significance of the last term in all countries reflect the role of
previous (C/Y)t-1 for all cases, demonstrating the role of previ-
ous habits. But in general we can assert that we found a weak
presence of Duesenberry´s effect in the sample. The worst
results came from the case of Mexico. Serial autocorrelation
was controlled using the h-Durbin test which is appropriate
for autoregressive models.
This result should encourage us to go further in this kind of
research. The Duesenberry effect is easily measured for regu-
lar periods of expansion and contractions. But Latin America
went through huge policy shifts during these last twenty years
generating important changes in income distribution across
households and different impacts coming form changes in fiscal
and monetary policies.
Another limitation was the fact we used Ecla´s time series
in constant dollars, instead of original country time series in
domestic currencies.This fact generates also many distortions
as exchange rate fluctuations plague countries as Mexico, Bra-
zil and Argentina. Colombia has a more stable exchange rate
policy until the 90s when the traditional crawling peg system
was abandoned.
And last but not least, we were restricted to use annual
data as quarterly data was not available.This issue reduced the
size of the samples and limited our research.

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 Jairo J. Parada, William Bacca

Conclusions

Despite the disappearance of John Duesenberry´s Consump-

tion theory form mainstream text books we argue this approach
should be recovered in research and teaching in Economics.
Modern empirical evidence suggests that this approach is more
suitable to current events as Robert H. Franks has suggested.
Accepting a vision of Consumption based on a social envi-
ronment follows a valid conception of an economy embedded
in society. Consumer is no longer seen as a lighting calculator
as Veblen used to say. For that reason, from a paradigmatic dif-
ferent perspective we are at variance with Palley´s argument
directed to integrate Duesenberry´s theory with Firedman´s
Permanent Income Hypothesis. Modern empirical evidence
does not require us to do that. Fiscal Policies are still power-
ful in a modern world characterized by a monetary theory of
production where is a deep connection between the APC and
the liquidity preference Keynesian theory.
The empirical evidence we found for Duesenberry´s Con-
sumption was valid for one country of a sample of four. But
strong limitations of data sets could be the main reason. All
regressions showed that past-consumption is a very important
determinant of present consumption.
If that is the case, macro policies oriented to squeeze con-
sumption through higher interest rates as inflation-targeting
policies seem to suggest and anti-labor wage policies, are
condemned to failure as they reduce an important protective
floor for the economy regarding aggregate demand. In devel-
oping nations this fact of life means unemployment, under-
employment and lack of accelerated growth very necessary
for development.

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 the relevance of duesenberry consumption theory:
an applied case to latin america

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